Treatment of substrates, for example by etching, cleaning, or deposition, is conventionally carried out in reaction chambers while the reactant flows across the surface of the substrate. Atmospheric and sub-atmospheric pressures are used, as are relatively high and relatively low temperatures. In the processing of substrates, particularly silicon substrates, it is advantageous to use plasma rather than temperature as the basic drive for deposition.
It is an object of this invention to provide for such a condition, because the energy for the disassociation of the reactant can be derived from a plasma instead of from a thermal condition.
The creation of plasma conditions is relatively simple for single wafer operations. However, deposition processes are advantageously and economically conducted only in batch operations while treating a relatively large number of substrates at one time. This requires a fairly large packing factor in order to reduce the required labor and processing time. It is an object of this invention to provide for improved utilization of the reactor's volume by enabling a large number of substrates simultaneously to be treated in a plasma environment by isolating them in such a way that the reactions from one will not affect its neighbor.